Sunday, January 4, 2009

It was certainly a busy weekend here. Aunt C and Uncle M, along with Grandpa R, all arrived on Friday evening. Here is the promised picture of Evie with her uncle, isn't it adorable? She was alternately fascinated, delighted and frightened by his beard. We're all eagerly anticipating Uncle M getting a good professorship somewhere, since he's finishing his PhD in a few weeks, so that he and C can settle down in a nice college town somewhere and have enough time and stability for a cousin for Evie... :)

In other news, we got a package from Am@zon on Friday, with a bath seat for Evie. So, she had her first "big girl" bath, in the tub all by herself! She had her second bath in it tonight and so far it is working great. It keeps her at a perfect angle to 1. maximize water coverage so that she stays warm 2. keep her ears and face out of the water and 3. make it easy to rinse her hair. She is having a great time kicking and splashing, and giggling at the shower head. We have no idea why the shower head is so funny, but she flirts with it throughout the bath. Here she is:

In other firsts/milestone news, we are now feeding Evie 6 oz. of formula before bed. If she continues doing well with this, we'll try 6 oz. at other feedings and aim for 5 feedings per day (instead of 6).

On Saturday we drove to a local mall and met R & G for lunch and Build.A.Bear fun. I got the idea from Jessica to do BAB, but we did it a little differently. I got non-identifying pictures of R & G, so I feel comfortable posting them. Here is G holding Evie at lunch; it was so sweet to see them together and Evie turned on the flirt for him for awhile:

Here is R giving Evie's bear a BAB bath:

R & G picked out a pink sundress for the bear to wear home :) and named her "Pearl." G chose the name and only he knows the significance...I didn't question him about it. My one regret is that in the moment, since I was the photographer, I forgot to ask G to kiss the bear's heart...only R kissed it. Darn. What do you think, should I go back and get another heart and get G to kiss it sometime and then go back to BAB and have them open up Pearl and give her a second heart, or just leave well enough alone? I'm conflicted.

J and I were talking about the concept of naming Evie's stuffed animals, since she's too young to do so yet. It's sweet that her bear was named by G, but we have been naming her other toys for our own amusement. For example, Evie's favorite toy by far is one that my sister, Anne, sent her from Germany. It is similar to this, but has a bug instead of a mouse, and the cloth underneath is green and shaped like a leaf. The teether part of it is orange. We have been calling this her "bug on a leaf" toy, and you can see it in her lap in this post. Anyhow, J decided to name it "Blitzen." It's German. Ha ha. Anyhow, I'm rambling, I know, but it is her favorite because there are so many places to grab; she loves to stuff the whole thing into her face and say "gaaa!" to it. She usually manages to get one of the bug's legs or antenna into her mouth; she sucks on it for a few seconds and then looks triumphant. Cute, cute, cute. Anyhow, her favorite toy deserved a name, but I'm not sure about J's choice.

Back to R & G, they are indeed getting married next weekend. I don't think I'm going to know what to think/feel about this development until I have a few years of 20/20 hindsight, so for right now I'm just going to say good for them and we wish them the best! It will be VERY interesting in the future if Evie has full siblings that she can grow up knowing. Fun, interesting, and strange.

Today, after church, I went shopping for Rachel. Jen, expect some cute things in the mail soon! :)

ETA: A reader reminded me about something that I meant to write about in this post, another reason we met R & G this weekend (besides wanting them to see Evie at this cute age). I have been working on the next post in my "successful adoption" series; it is to be about creating a profile. I was stymied by the task of doing this because I don't have a copy of our profile anymore. I know some people create many copies of a short profile and in that case it wouldn't make sense not to keep a copy, but our agency has couples create three copies of a longer profile. Ours was several pages in scrapbook form. At one time I did have photographs of the pages, but the computer they were on had a hard drive failure and the people I had e-mailed the pictures to no longer have them.

So, you ask, what happened to the 3 hard copies? The first one was lost on M & T. We asked for it back after Lucy's adoption fell through, but they never returned it to us. The other two were given back to our SW; we had them in our possession for a short time while we were matched with M & T (we actually drove them back to our SWs office on the afternoon of the day we lost Lucy; it felt good to do that one small task which could move us out of our grief and toward hope for a second match). When we met G at our SWs office, after he left, we asked her for one profile back, since she said she had given one to R. We wanted to have a copy of it for Evie' benefit, some day. She couldn't find it and later called us up and hypothesized that she had given it to G. So we believed for a few months that R & G both had copies.

No problem, we would just ask them to bring a copy next time we got together (...yesterday...) and I would take pictures of the pages. But when I talked to G on the phone as I invited him to lunch, he claimed that he not only didn't have a copy, he said he'd never laid eyes on it! He called me back later and said that R saw it when she chose us but doesn't have a copy either. How in the world could our SW, or R, or G, or all three of them, lose not one but two 2" thick 12"x12" scrapbooks? The mystery remains unsolved, but I am deciding to work on the post about profiles even without photos of ours, and it will probably get posted tomorrow, or Tuesday if Evie doesn't nap well tomorrow.

8 comments:

It is so generous of you to encourage contact with R&G. I know Evie will be grateful to you one day for going that extra mile. And congrats to them for getting married. Evie will always know that she came from people who loved each other...which might make some of the adoption sore spots in the future a bit easier to manage.Also...on the lost scrapbook...if you still have the old computer with the dead drive, you might be able to salvage it by yanking out the hand drive and inserting it into an external housing. We did this last time my husband killed a computer. Turned out the motherboard/processor had died but the hard drive and the info therein were just fine. It cost about $30 total and was well worth it to salvage the information on the hard drive.

Hope you solve the mystery of the lost scrapbooks! That's great you are able to have contact with R&G, I think that's a wonderful thing for Evie. Speaking of Evie, she just gets cuter and cuter with every post! PS: I'm reading "The Time Traveler's Wife"- yes, love it! Thank you for the recommendation, we'll have to cyber-discuss it when I'm finished :)

What an incredible day together. I am still amazed as I watch your story unfold. It's like reading science fiction, and you're this unearthly heroine. You rock, mama. =)

How, INDEED, could three copies of your awesome scrapbook become lost? It's not like you gave them a stapled leaflet---it was in a binder and everything! WTF? I really hope you can snag one back---what a treasure for Evie!

August 26, 1995--We met at an Alpha Epsilon Pi frat party on the grounds of the University of Virginia. I was a 17-year-old first year student in the College of Arts and Sciences (double major in English and Psychology) and J was a 22-year-old in his first year of graduate school (Engineering, Materials Science)